and undoubtedly effect a work of evil almost as great as is
wrought by bad associations.

Look out, boys, for the tempter in this guise. If a companion offers
you a book the character of which is suspicious, take it home to your
father, your mother, or some reliable older friend, for examination.
If it is handed you with an air of secrecy, or if a promise to keep
it hidden from others is required, have nothing to do with it. You might
better place a coal of fire or a live viper in your bosom than to allow
yourself to read such a book. The thoughts that are implanted in the
mind in youth will stick there through life, in spite of all efforts
to dislodge them. Hundreds of men who have been thus injured when young,
but have by some providence escaped a life of vice and shame, look back
with most intense regret to the early days of childhood, and earnestly
wish that the pictures then made in the mind by bad books might be
effaced. Evil impressions thus formed often torture minds during a
whole lifetime. In the most inopportune moments they will intrude
themselves. When the individual desires to place his mind undividedly
upon sacred and elevated themes, even at the most solemn moments of
life, these lewd pictures will sometimes intrude themselves in spite
of his efforts to avoid them. It is an awful thing to allow the mind
to be thus contaminated; and many a man would give the world, if he
possessed it, to be free from the horrible incubus of a defiled
imagination.

Vile Pictures.--Obscene and lascivious pictures are influences which
lead boys astray too important to be unnoticed. Evil men, agents of
the arch-fiend, have adopted all sorts of devices for putting into the
hands of the boys and youths of the rising generation pictures
calculated to excite the passions, to lead to vice. Thousands of these
vile pictures are in circulation throughout the country in spite of
the worthy efforts of such philanthropists as Mr. Anthony Comstock and
his co-laborers. In almost every large school there are boys who have
a supply of these infamous designs and act as agents in scattering the
evil contagion among all who come under their influence.

Under the guise of art, the genius of some of our finest artists is
turned to pandering to this base desire for sensuous gratification.
The pictures which hang in many of our art galleries that are visited
by old and young of both sexes often number in the list views which
to those whose tho